Homework is one aspect of the general education curriculum that has been widely recognized as important to academic success. Teachers have long used homework to provide additional learning time, strengthen study and organizational skills, and in some respects, keep parents informed of their children's progress.
Photo Credit to Marco Nedermeijer
The main purposes of homework:
Practice: Homework may be given to help students practice the skills learned in class. Direct application through repeated practice helps a child retain what's been learned. Class time is often inadequate to learn skills that take practice. For example, math facts and formulas need to be applied several times before they are understood and internalized. Homework gives kids the chance to practice what they learned in class.
Thinking: Homework gets kids thinking about what they learned when they're outside of school. This gives the brain a chance to continue learning in a different environment. That provides valuable practice for real-life situations where kids will need to apply their knowledge.
Preparation: Homework may be given to help prepare students for testing, or to use new information in a particular situation. For example, preparing for a report or an experiment by doing preliminary research can help the student be ready for the event in class. It also reinforces the student's responsibility for her education.
Extension: Homework may extend learning by adding new information to what was discussed in class. Long-term assignments, such as science fair projects or reports, help students apply their learning to a situation, or incorporate their own ideas into a project. This builds thinking skills and helps personalize the learning.
As claimed byNorthwest Educational Technology Consortiumthere are four types of homework that we should recognize as well as knowing when and why to have students practice:
Memorization of basic rules, algorithms, or laws so the skill becomes rote.
Increase in skill speed, used for improving students' abilities to apply these skills in more complex problem solving.
Deepening understanding of a concept—providing students time to read further, elaborating on a new idea and expanding their understanding.
Preparation for the following day's learning, such as an advance organizer or cue to increase readiness for new information.
Key takeaways:
Remember the main purposes of homework: to build rote memorization and automaticity; to provide time to deepen understanding though elaboration and to increase readiness for new information.
Assign homework that includes very few concepts so students can learn them on a deeper level (Healy, 1990).
Match homework to the learning goal for a more focused learning experience.
Provide appropriate and timely feedback. Students need to know what was correct, what needs to be changed, etc., and they need this information sooner rather than later. Waiting several days or even weeks to provide feedback limits or even eliminates the effectiveness of the assignment.
Parental involvement should be limited to facilitating the completion of homework – not teaching content or doing the work for a child. Parents who get too involved in an assignment inhibit rather than enhance learning.
*Older students do more homework than the younger students.*
This one is fairly obvious: The National Education Association recommends that homework time increase by ten minutes per year in school.
Studies have found that schools tend to roughly follow these guidelines: The University of Michigan foundthat students ages six to eight spend 29 minutes doing homework per night while 15 to 17 year old students spend 50 minutes doing homework. The Metlife study also found that 50 percent of students in grades seven to 12 spent more than an hour a night on homework, while 37 percent of students in grades three to six spent an hour or more on their homework per night. The National Center for Educational Statistics found that high school students who do homework outside of school average 6.8 hours of homework per week.
Homework is one aspect of the general education curriculum that has been widely recognized as important to academic success. Teachers have long used homework to provide additional learning time, strengthen study and organizational skills, and in some respects, keep parents informed of their children's progress.
The main purposes of homework:
Practice: Homework may be given to help students practice the skills learned in class. Direct application through repeated practice helps a child retain what's been learned. Class time is often inadequate to learn skills that take practice. For example, math facts and formulas need to be applied several times before they are understood and internalized. Homework gives kids the chance to practice what they learned in class.
Thinking: Homework gets kids thinking about what they learned when they're outside of school. This gives the brain a chance to continue learning in a different environment. That provides valuable practice for real-life situations where kids will need to apply their knowledge.
Preparation: Homework may be given to help prepare students for testing, or to use new information in a particular situation. For example, preparing for a report or an experiment by doing preliminary research can help the student be ready for the event in class. It also reinforces the student's responsibility for her education.
Extension: Homework may extend learning by adding new information to what was discussed in class. Long-term assignments, such as science fair projects or reports, help students apply their learning to a situation, or incorporate their own ideas into a project. This builds thinking skills and helps personalize the learning.
For more information click here
As claimed by Northwest Educational Technology Consortium there are four types of homework that we should recognize as well as knowing when and why to have students practice:
Key takeaways:
For more information click here
*Older students do more homework than the younger students.*
This one is fairly obvious: The National Education Association recommends that homework time increase by ten minutes per year in school.
Studies have found that schools tend to roughly follow these guidelines: The University of Michigan found that students ages six to eight spend 29 minutes doing homework per night while 15 to 17 year old students spend 50 minutes doing homework. The Metlife study also found that 50 percent of students in grades seven to 12 spent more than an hour a night on homework, while 37 percent of students in grades three to six spent an hour or more on their homework per night. The National Center for Educational Statistics found that high school students who do homework outside of school average 6.8 hours of homework per week.
For more information click here
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